Lisk Weekly News Roundup – Week 7

Bringing you the best Lisk news of the week! Keep up to date with the Lisk blockchain platform in a few minutes read.

The Pioneer’s Vault

This Wednesday Max Kordek, the co-founder of Lisk, announced that he has created “The Pioneer’s Vault” to help further stimulate Lisk’s ecosystem growth. The Pioneer’s Vault consists of Max’s own personal LSK assets, which are going to be reserved for investmenting in promising Lisk sidechain projects. Max announced in a blog post that he will personally pledge 1,700,000 LSK (around 51 million dollar at current prices) to this initiative. In the post Max writes about how he envisions a future where the Lisk platform has hundreds of sidechains running on it, which will enable thousands of ICOs (initial coin offering) to be conducted. In order to make this future a reality, Lisk will need high-quality sidechains to be developed on the platform from early on. Max also stated that he will solely support projects which intend to conduct an ICO or already have an ICO running on Lisk. Two days later Max made another blog post in which he announced that the first investment from The Pioneer’s Vault will be made in MADANA (Market for Data Analysis). This project enables individuals to participate in their data market while simultaneously preserving their privacy. Its ecosystem functions with tokens known as PAX (Privacy Analysis Exchange). These tokens can be used to buy data analysis results from MADANA’s decentralized information pool while rewarding data producers. The MADANA project has received €200.000 to prepare for an ICO on the Lisk platform later this year. This will make MADANA one of the first major Lisk ICO’s, with many more to follow. For more information about The Pioneer’s Vault and the MADANA project, please read both of Max’s blog posts.

4 Upcoming ICO’s and Projects

The website invest in blockchain posted a nice article about 4 upcoming Lisk ICO’s and Projects which will expand the Lisk ecosystem. The first project is Sapiens, which is building a blockchain-based platform that will allow users to manage certifications, records, and reputational data (in short, every aspect of an academic or professional career) in an innovative way. This project was founded by Mateo Ferrari (Hirish), who is also the co-creator of the Lisk Ascend pledge system. At the moment, Sapiens is still in the early stages of development, but it is planning an ICO on the Lisk platform in the future.
The second project the artice writes about is Moosecoin. Moosty is a multifaceted, decentralized organization for musicians that tackles ownership rights, music distribution, and royalties. The project is currently in the midst of their ICO and currently you can still take advantage of the 100% Moose bonus for early investors. This bonus will give you double the amount of “Moosecoins” for your investment. Moosecoins are going to be the tokens that will be used on their Lisk sidechain. Under the tagline “give musicians a chance”, Moosty envisions a new blockchain-based ecosystem that creates conditions for transparency, ease of use/payment, and fair distribution.
The next future sidechain in the article is Moracle, which is a project to bring a decentralized oracle service to the Lisk platform. An oracle service is necessary in order for blockchain applications to access data from the open internet. Oracle services exist for Ethereum, but are centralized and can have pricey fees. Moracle solves these problems by offering a full decentralized oracle service for Lisk. Using the MRCL token as the sidechain currency for all oracle service payments, users will be able to earn by running a node. This will allow for low prices and a fast network. The article also features the Moracle roadmap for 2018, which shows some big plans. At the moment you can already start earning MRCL tokens by voting for Delegate StellarDynamic, you will earn 85 MRCL tokens for each LSK forged at pool.stellardynamic.io. StellarDynamic will also use 5% of his forged LSK to fund Moracle and help in making the project succeed.
The last project mentioned is CoinAngels, which presents itself as “the Blockchain and NON-Blockchain startup accelerator that uses the power of ‘angel’ tokens and the voice of all ‘angel’ holders to help digital driven companies in their early stage.” It is not confirmed if CoinAngels will be running a sidechain on the Lisk platform, but seeing that Lisk co-founders Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows are both advisors for the CoinAngels project makes it more then likely.
All in all this article gives a nice glimpse into the future of the Lisk project and future sidechains, so I would definitely recommend reading the article and looking into the named projects.

Hardware Wallet Support

Thursday we got some exciting news Lisk security wise as the GDT pool announced that Lisk hardware wallet support is estimated to be released somewhere this summer. As some of you might know, GDT members Vekexasia and Alepop have been working hard on getting the Lisk community the long awaited Ledger Nano and Trezor hardware wallet support. The main idea behind hardware wallets is to isolate your cryptographic secrets (private keys) from your computer or smartphone, which can be easily hackable, in order to protect your coins/tokens. A Ledger Nano or Trezor allows you to send/receive payments and check your accounts, without taking the risk of losing everything. This is because you will first need to physically press certain buttons on the Ledger or Trezor to enter your passphrases and confirm the transaction you want to make. At the moment it is also possible to create offline wallets using the offline tools created by Lisksnake. This way your wallet passphrases will never touch the internet because you first create an offline transaction on a offline pc. Then you use the Lisk wallet app (also sponsored by GDT) to scan the QR code you got and press send transaction, thus making the offline transaction a online one.

Get Involved

There are many things that the Lisk community and you as a individual can do to help promote Lisk. Community managers Mat and Jan have already held over 30 video calls with community members who want to help promote Lisk around the globe. If you are interested in getting involved or have a new idea to promote Lisk then sent Lisk a message on events@lisk.io or talk to Mat and Jan on the Lisk.chat.

Lisk In The Second Round On BitIndia

In last weeks edition I wrote about the multiple voting contests where Lisk needed its community’s support. I am happy to announce that Lisk has made it into the second round of the BitIndia vote contest. Lisk managed to stay in the top 5, which at first would be the number of coins/tokens to make it to the second round, but BitIndia later changed this to 15 coins/tokens. This might have been done because there was some suspicion of large numbers of votes being cast by bots. At the time of writing this roundup Lisk is in the sixth place with 11.79% of the total amount of votes. It looks like the top 6 coins/tokens will either continue to a final round or will just win the contest. And with number seven having just 2% of the votes the chances of Lisk staying in the top 6 are almost certain.

Core 1.0 Development visualization

Lisk delegate iii.element.iii has made another Github development visualisation, and this time it visualizes the development of Lisk Core 1.0 under the tune of Skynet (The Terminator). The length is around 4 minutes, but make sure you watch the whole video to get a feeling of : the increasing number of people contributing to the development of Lisk Core 1.0, the increasing number of files, the tremendous amount of work put into lisk-core and much more. To lay the focus on the recent increase in development, iii.element.iii accelerated the part till September 2017 by 3x. This video is especially amazing to watch if you are not that technical or not following the Lisk Github development progress on a regular basis. So make sure you check out this great development visualization.

Lisk community update

This week LiskHQ released the Lisk community update for the month of January. The blog post contains a company, community, marketing and development update. Some of you might wonder where the update is on the financial status of Lisk but this will be given at the Relaunch event next week. The company update is all about the new exchange listings, lightcurve team members and the move of LiskHQ to their new WeWork office. As well as the announcement that Lisk is still looking for the next big talent to join the team. The community update ofcourse features our new community manager Jan (who created and moderated the official Lisk Reddit channel). It also mentions the new Lisk social media channels, giveaways, competitions and all of the Lisk meetups that where hosted by the Lisk community. In January the Lisk marketing team made introduction video’s for Lisk Meetups, created four blog posts and had multitude of social media updates. They also had three interviews with BitHub, Crypto Cynic and JAXEnter. Lisk also had 51 cryptocurrency or mainstream media mentions. Last but not least the development update is about the further team expansion in January with the hiring of backend developers Manu and Vitaly. The release of Lisk Nano 1.3.4 and the development team pushing productivity to new levels as you can also have seen in the developement visualization video.

Lisk.support

A couple of weeks ago we held a $500 worth of Lisk giveaway to promote our new Lisk.support forum. On behalf of the entire Lisk.support team I would like to congratulate our lucky winner ulTimas! But this was not our only giveaway because lst Friday we gave away another $500 worth of Lisk in our second Lisk.support Search & Win contest. This contest was held to celebrate the over 20 Lisk Weekly News Roundups written in 2017 & 2018. Once again the contenders did not disappoint and the passphrase was found within the hour. We would like to congratulate Kinu on being the first one to solve the challenge and by doing so winning $500 worth of Lisk and receiving the winner badge on the Lisk.support forum.

At the moment we also still two current giveaways in which you can take part. The first one is the Lisk.support Art Challenge in which the most creative and artistic Lisk community members have the best chance of winning the $500 in Lisk tokens. All you have to do is create an image that contains our name Lisk.support or logo and upload it to the Art Challenge page. We already have some great entry’s but its not to late to win, just make sure you upload your image before the 26th of february (2018). We will use a public poll for the Lisk community to decide who created the winning image. The second giveaway is the Lisk.support t-shirt bet, in which delegate Joo5ty made the following bet : If Lisk reaches $100 in the month of february (2018) Joo5ty will send everyone who replied in the topic a free Lisk.support t-shirt. You can still take part in this potential giveaway until the 28th of February all you have to do is give a reply in the topic.

We would also like to ask the community their opinion about Lisk meetups. Please help us out by filling in the 4 poll questions we created, all provided information will remain anonymous.

Last but not least we would like to thank the following delegates for their contribution to the Lisk.support team : communitypool, grumlin@temp and joo5ty!

Let us know what you think about this weeks Lisk news roundup in the comments below!